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The Centre facilitates student-led initiatives such as reading groups, film screenings, awareness drives, and workshops. Many of these are organized in collaboration with work-study students, volunteers and interns who engage with the Centre throughout the year.

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what we do

The Centre organizes annual conferences, round tables, and symposiums, to enable conversations around complex and provocative issues that are under-represented in public discourse. In 2017, we organized an international conference titled "Sex/Ed" in partnership with the Wellesley Centers for Women. In 2018, the Centre will be organizing "Sexuality and Harassment", a roundtable meant to tackle the complexities rather than the certainties of sexual desire.

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what we do

The Centre hosts two flagship programmes: ISHQ (Issues in Society, History, and Queerness), a cross-disciplinary speaker series that hosts scholars, thinkers, and activists from wide-ranging disciplines once every month during the academic year, and ADA (Art, Desire and Activism), an on-going arts series that encourages conversations on sexuality, desire, and gender expression through provocative and eye-opening media such as theatre, dance, poetry, and visual arts.

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understanding gender and sexuality

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) is the first Centre of its kind in India to study the broader spectrum of questions relating to both gender and sexuality. This spectrum includes issues of inequality, fantasy, pleasure, identity, and politics that are key realities of our everyday lives.

Set in the interdisciplinary Liberal Arts context of Ashoka University, the Centre is committed to studying the many intersections at which we encounter these questions, in India and around the world, and address them through scholarship and activism.

our initiatives

ISHQ: Issues in Society, History, and QueernessISHQ is a cross-disciplinary speaker series that hosts speakers (scholars, thinkers, and activists from wide-ranging disciplines) once every month during the academic year.

ADA: Art-Desire-ActivismADA is an on-going arts series that encourages conversations on sexuality, desire, and gender expression through provocative and eye-opening media such as theatre, dance and poetry.

events at csgs

Event Details

The debate around sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement already seems to be saturated in terms of meaningful dialogue. While on the one hand, these

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Event Details

The debate around sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement already seems to be saturated in terms of meaningful dialogue. While on the one hand, these conversations have led to a social and political awakening about systemic issues facing women in patriarchal societies, on the other hand, it has resulted in the flattening of nuances involved in negotiating a sexual relationship. The purpose of this one-day round table is to reopen this dialogue and move beyond cautionary tales about perpetrators and narratives of victimhood in order to see how we can provide a radical challenge to the ways in which we sexually relate to and work with one another.

These conversations, spread across three panels, will look at the many dimensions involved in sexual desire, attraction, boundary setting, agency and transgression. Can we universally codify what it means to be in a consensual relationship? Do we understand the cultural undercurrents and the formal structures that inform our agency to give consent, as well as the power differentials that underpin it?

These questions are not entirely new, but by looking at them through the lenses of psychological formations, cultural practices, and legal frameworks, we intend to throw open the complexities of desire, the difficulties of defining “due process” and the limits of harassment, the centrality of the law and within that, our approaches to crime and punishment in the context of sexual violence.